A paperless office setting does not exist. Paper documents are often lost or delayed during the usual review and manual transfer of documents in a workflow through an organization. The ability to track and/or retrieve a document is critical to business processes.
Barcoding is one technique for assisting in the manual or semi-automated handling and processing of documents. Currently, barcode tracking of documents does not provide an adequate method of tracking documents that is based on a record of the current location of a document. Additionally, this technology is cumbersome as each document must be optically scanned, labor intensive, and lacking in real-time accuracy. There is a need for document tracking capabilities providing timely, accurate data.